He left his hotel room and walked along the corridor until he came to the stairs. Although it was well past midnight, the bar down below was still open, and someone was playing a slow and sentimental tune on the piano. The hotel lobby must have been lavish once, in the days when the railroad was being constructed, but now it looked more like a barn that someone had perversely painted with dim murals of naked nymphs and Doric temples. Under the sagging chandelier, twenty or thirty men sat at scratched and drink-stained tables with their hats firmly on their heads, drinking bourbon and smoking pipes, talking too loudly and wishing to God they were someplace else. Three fans revolved uselessly, making no impression on the sodden heat or the dense tobacco smoke. By the desk was a black-framed list of the hotel rules — no smoking in the bath, no spitting off the balconies, no more than three to the bed. There were no palms in the hotel foyer, as in the hotels in New York; the management’s policy was that if a guest wanted to look at a palm, he could step outside the door and see enough damned palms to last him for the rest of his life.

Collis went down the creaking stairs and across to the bar, where the Spanish barkeep was polishing glasses on the sleeve of his baggy shirt. Collis asked for a stone fence, but the barkeep only stared at him, so he made do with three fingers of Old Carstairs Authentic. Then he leaned back against the bar and looked around, still feeling tired, but somehow more excited with the way his life was turning out than he had been for days. Maybe now he was in Panama he’d begun to recognise that there was no turning back, and that whatever was going to come next, he was going to have to bite the bullet and make the best of it.

At the grand piano, by the light of a tarnished candelabrum, an elderly man in a soiled straw hat and whiskers as sparse as a tomcat was playing an emotional French tune, a tune of lost loves and heartbreaks and Sunday walks on the banks of the Seine, with an unerring instinct for hitting the wrong note at the peak of each bar; meanwhile a tall man in a yellow vest was singing some other song altogether. Nobody seemed to mind, or care; here in Aspinwall on a rainy summer night, everybody had his mind on other things. There were occasional sallies of laughter, but they were short-lived and strained.

Collis had almost finished his whisky when Andrew Jackson Hunt came downstairs and walked across to the bar.

‘How do you do?’ he said, raising his hat.

‘Much better, thank you for asking,’ Collis told him. ‘I managed to get in a couple of hours’ sleep, at least.’